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About 30 kindergartners slid, swiveled and shimmied on platforms shaped like miniature snowboards Wednesday in an attempt to get a feel for the slippery sport.

Instructional equipment was separated into four sections and sprawled across the Lake Tahoe Environmental Science Magnet School gym. Kids were then able to go from one station to the next, learning about different aspects of snowboarding as they went.

Mindi Befu, marketing director for Sierra-at-Tahoe, said the experience might be the first step toward children becoming lifetime snowboarders.

“Familiarity is a big factor in sort of overcoming one’s fears,” she said.

In partnership with Burton Snowboards, Sierra presented the hands-on class in conjunction with both companies’ efforts to get youth snowboarding.

The class — called Riglet Snowboarding for PE — works toward this goal by helping kids learn snowboarding basics, such as balance, body movements, grabs and more.

For instance, one station involved kids standing on small plastic “snowboards” while their classmates pulled them with an attached rope. Another consisted of rocking on a concave shell — a balancing exercise.

On two large plastic mats, a Sierra ski instructor taught children how to perform different snowboarding grabs while holding a re-creation of an Olympic torch in the air.

“We really want to connect the Olympics and snowboarding because there’s so much interest right now,” Befu said.

Additionally, each student received a gold medal at the end of the class.

Befu said Burton launched the program in Vermont about a month again, and Sierra hopes to see it expand further locally.

“We’d love for it to expand to our whole district,” she said.

The Magnet School would also like to see more programs like it in the future, said Principal Joel Dameral.

“It was an amazing program,” he said Thursday. “The kids were fired up all day long.”

Art auction coming to college

Lake Tahoe Community College will host the third annual “Off the Wall” art auction in March for the benefit of the LTCC Foundation and Rotary Club of South Lake Tahoe.

The Foundation and Rotary Club will present the event, which will consist of selling works from local artists during a silent and live auction on March 29. Entrance to that event is $10.

Additionally, a free kickoff party will be held March 24 so potential buyers can begin looking at which art pieces they may want to bid on at the end of the week.

Three George Whittell High School students won awards at a regional art competition in Reno on Jan. 28.

Senior Suzie Elias was awarded two honorable mentions for her outdoor photography, seventh-grader Alize Hernandez won a gold award for her relief print “Laugh Out Loud Again and Again” and seventh-grader Alexandra Palant won a silver award for a collagraph print of a surfer at the beach.

The ceremony to honor the competition winners will be held March 15 at the Nevada Museum of Art.

The competition was held at the Nevada Museum of Art and had more than 1,300 individual pieces of art entered this year by local students in Northern Nevada, according to the high school.